In the face of record-breaking inflation, another COVID surge, a disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, rising crime, and supply scarcity, the Democrat Party has decided to make a few hours of rioting at the U.S. Capitol its entire campaign platform, while ignoring months of riots that sent cities and small businesses up in flames from coast to coast.
Rioting in all its forms should be condemned, but the left’s bald willingness to overlook its own while targeting private citizens for peaceful protests that occurred independently from the events on Capitol Hill last January just makes its hysteria over Jan. 6 look desperate. Breaking into the Capitol was wrong, but it was not 9/11, the people involved are still entitled to the Fifth Amendment, and screaming “threat to democracy!” is not enough to rescue fumbling Democrats in the 2022 midterms.
If you don’t think Democrats in government and the media are exaggerating when they call the unrest at the Capitol the biggest threat to democracy ever, here are five other things they insisted would bring down our system of governance.
1. Democracy Itself
When an elected majority in the U.S. Senate, including West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, determined not to pass President Joe Biden’s Build Back Bankrupt plan, the left erupted in cries that this act of democratic governance was, in fact, threatening democracy itself.
“Manchin is killing the Biden legislative agenda, and perhaps the future of American democracy too,” tweeted MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan.
“If Manchin is no on both BBB and voting, Biden is done. Democracy is hanging by a thread,” observed Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post. The Daily Beast’s Wajahat Ali pined that Manchin’s decision not to vote for Biden’s agenda “reflects the need for massive structural reform and change. In its absence we’re a shell of a democracy.”
2. The Other Political Party in Our Two-Party System
“The GOP Is a Grave Threat to American Democracy,” ran a serious headline at The Atlantic in April.
“Americans must get serious about fighting the Republican threat to our democracy,” blared another headline in the Chicago Sun-Times, adding “the party has become a corrupt force spouting violent rhetoric and plotting to overthrow our democracy.”
“It’s not your grandfather’s Republican Party now, unless your grandfather was a fascist,” the pretentious subhead warns. “The GOP is dangerous, and we must take action to make sure our children live in a free country.”
“The GOP has proven to be an even ‘greater threat’ to US democracy than Trump in 2021, experts warn,” said a headline from Insider, as if the allusion to “experts” blessed the piece with scientific objectivity.
3. Parents at School Board Meetings
We all know about the letter from the National School Boards Association to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice smearing concerned parents of schoolchildren as “domestic terrorists.” The NSBA letter begged the DOJ to use domestic terrorism laws to go after parents who showed up to school board meetings to protest critical race theory, masking kids, and even rape in school bathrooms.
In response, Garland issued a directive to federal law enforcement and attorneys to address “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools.”
An op-ed in the Mercury News said it even more bluntly: “Attacks on school boards are a threat to democracy.”
4. The U.S. Supreme Court
New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz threatened last month that “If the Court’s right-wing majority finds that it can continually push the boundaries of conservative judicial activism without undermining its own popular legitimacy, then the consequences for progressivism and popular democracy could be dire.”
“Two-thirds of the justices have now been appointed by a party that’s won the most votes just once in the last eight presidential elections. The very existence of a court that’s both so powerful and so far out of step with public opinion undermines the democratic values on which our system rests,” added Brennan Center fellow Zachary Roth.
5. Our Bicameral Legislature
The bicameral design of our legislative branch, set up in Article I, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution to ensure that Americans were represented based on both population size and state interests, is a threat, according to some unhinged predictions from the left.
The Electoral College, another institution hated by the left when it contradicts their desires, “poses a smaller long-term threat to American democracy than the Senate,” urged a Vox article, because “the Senate undermines principles of equal democratic representation.”
“The Senate will continue to give small states, which tend to be rural and conservative, far more clout than their size deserves. That’s not just a problem for democracy in the abstract,” the Brennan Center’s Roth continues.
He goes on to indicate his real, politically-motivated problem with the founders’ design: “Because these states are more likely to support Republicans, it gives the GOP a built-in advantage, and makes it all but impossible to achieve large-scale progressive outcomes in Washington, even those that are popular.” Nevermind the fact that the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, already gave popular voters more control over the election of senators compared to the founders’ intended design.
So next time you hear a politician or pundit try to tell you that a few inexcusable hours of unruly behavior comprised the biggest threat to democracy in the nation’s history, remember they’re using similar language to condemn parents, political parties, our judicial branch of government, one of our two houses of Congress, and the very system in which an elected majority votes on proposed legislation. If you think the Jan. 6 rioters are the only target they want to destroy, you haven’t been paying attention.
